Rogers Pondering Sale Of Blue Jays As Another Media Company Whiffs With Baseball

Danny Barnes of the Toronto Blue Jays pitches against the New York Yankees in the Bronx borough of New York City. (Photo by Adam Hunger/Getty Images)

Partnerships between baseball teams and media companies rarely seem to go as planned.

When the Columbia Broadcasting System bought the New York Yankees for $13 million in 1964, the Bronx Bombers were about to make their fifth consecutive appearance in the World Series, and CBS was a big player in sports broadcasting.

It was a marriage that seemed to be made in heaven. Years of mediocrity ensued, and George Steinbrenner purchased the team in 1973 from CBS for $8.6 million. Today, the Yankees are baseball's most valuable team, worth $3.7 billion.

Three years later, Ted Turner bought the losing Atlanta Braves for $10 million. Given the man's genius, it's not surprising Turner was tremendously successful.

Turner, who also started CNN, used the Braves to underpin the TBS Superstation. The Braves became the best team in the National League during the 1990s. Turner made a bundle selling Turner Broadcasting to Time Warner in 1995. Time Warner sold the Braves to John Malone for $450 million in 2007.

In 1981, the Chicago Cubs were sold for $20.5 million by William Wrigley to the Tribune Company. Sure, televising the Cubs enabled Tribune to turn WGN into the first Superstation.

But the Cubs were losers under Tribune, which neglected the team. In 2008 Tribune filed for bankruptcy and in 2009 the Cubs, Wrigley Field and 25% of a regional sports network were sold to the Ricketts family for $845 million.

In 1998, Walt Disney bought the Anaheim Angels for $150 million.

As the New York Times reported, when Disney bought the Angels, "Disney executives thought they could own a suite of sports entertainment assets, which included the N.H.L.'s Anaheim Mighty Ducks, that it could exploit on television, in movies and at its Disneyland theme parks. Those investments, though, failed to pay off for Disney and proved to be money losers."